Society of the Mind

'That's all right. I can see him fine from here.'

'Don't you want to touch him?' Griffith asked, reaching out without looking and resting his hand on the robot's stomach. The robot glanced down for an instant, but then his head rose to stare blankly across the room at the bare wall. 'They've got pressure-sensitive membranes covering most of their bodies.' He pushed with his fingertips against the machine's flat gray abdomen. 'It gives them a sense of touch, but if they had body temperature it would feel almost like they've got skin. Come over here and check it out.'

She shook her head. 'That's okay. We can go now.'

Griffith ignored her, kneeling down. He pulled back the black stockings covering the robot's large feet and extracted a ballpoint pen from his pocket. 'He had a bit of mud right here.' He was totally exposed in that position. All the robot would have to do would be to reach down and… Griffith held his glasses tilted at an angle. 'All gone now,' he said as he looked at a crevice in the metal panels along the robot's shin. 'But like I told Mr. Gray, I don't think it was from any recent trips out. Must've been…' — he grunted as he rose to his feet, joints popping—'missed on our last detailing after a session out in the yard.'

Griffith turned back to the Model Eight. 'Bye-bye, Auguste,' he said, waving. As soon as he turned to leave, the robot sank to the floor in the corner. The white concrete was cold and bare. The robots lived like animals in some cruel, primitive zoo of yesteryear. Modern zoos went to great lengths to re-create the natural habitats of their animals. But robots… they had no natural habitat. At least not yet.

But they clearly want out of this cave, Laura thought. To roam around outdoors — free. Laura watched the robot return to his contemplative pose, his chin resting heavily on his fist.

When Griffith joined her, she said, 'Is he still resting or whatever — vegging?'

'Oh, no,' Griffith said. 'They've synchronized their pattern with our day and night. They're active during the manned shifts, and then they spend most of the third…' He twisted to look back over his shoulder and fell silent. He hadn't realized the robot had sunk to his place in the corner. 'That's odd,' Griffith said and he returned to Auguste. He pulled a small screwdriver from his breast pocket and pried open a panel on the robot's thigh. Griffith squinted and again tilted his glasses to read a glowing blue screen just above a large, three-pronged socket. 'Hmmph!' he said, closing the panel with a click and standing upright. 'Charge is good.' He looked at the lethargic robot with a puzzled expression on his face. 'I don't know what it could be.'

'Maybe he doesn't like captivity,' Laura suggested.

'What do you mean, 'captivity'?'

'I mean being locked up in here. In this room.'

'He's not locked up,' Griffith said. 'He's free to go wherever he wants in these facilities.'

'But there was a lock on the door. You had to use the retinal identifier.'

'We have to unlock doors. They just use their microwave transmitters and beam the access codes. They have the run of the place, which is only fair.'

'But surely you don't give them codes to the exits,' Laura said with a laugh. Griffith didn't respond, and she smiled. 'I mean, there is a lock on those, right?'

'Well… there's always the chance of a fire or another emergency down here. And, like I said, they're extremely valuable assets of Mr. Gray's…'

'You give them the codes to unlock the exterior doors?' Laura said in total amazement.

'Only the five robots in the 1.1 series — our most senior class — and Hightop, of course.'

32

'Mr. Gray is in his study reading reports or some such,' Janet said.

Laura continued up the staircase from the elevator. She felt shaken, but she couldn't tell why. Was it the ride up from the Model Eight facility, or what she'd seen in the eerie hollows down below?

Laura knocked on the study door, but there was no answer.

She went in. The fire crackled warmly. A freshly showered Gray sat in his thick leather chair, his feet propped up on his desk.

Papers were strewn all about. His head rested deep in the plush cushions.

He was sound asleep.

She smiled. So he's… sort of human, Laura thought. An afghan was draped over the sofa, and she got it and tiptoed to Gray's desk.

When she lifted the papers off his lap, he didn't even stir. He was so deep in sleep, she probably could've stuck the poker from the fireplace into his ribs and he wouldn't have budged. He'd rocked back so far he was fully reclined. She pulled the blanket up to his chin and covered him all the way down to his toes.

He looked like a child. Sleep softened the features of his face in some undefinable way. His eyelids were closed, smooth, relaxed.

His thick lashes were pressed together and his eyebrows like his hair were jet-black. When he woke, she felt sure, his eyes would again be ablaze with brilliance. She yearned to see them — to sense them drawn to her.

Laura looked up and saw Janet peering through the door. Janet smiled warmly and nodded before disappearing.

Laura didn't know what to make of Janet's stare, but she dared not let herself think about its meaning. She couldn't risk grappling with the nascent feelings that welled up inside her. Her emotional center was too unsteady — the result of a tension between the warm glow of happiness she felt just then and her anxiety over the mysteries surrounding its source. So Laura did the only thing she could manage.

She blanked out her mind, left the study, and wandered without thinking into the crisp morning air outside.

An empty car stood at the bottom of the steps. She knew it was time to go back to work, and she got into the car and strapped herself in.

'Please take me…' she said before hesitating, 'to Mr. Hoblenz. But not if he's too busy… or if he is, you know, someplace dangerous.' The door closed, and the car pulled away immediately, turning right at the gate toward the nuclear reactor.

The cooling tower and containment dome no longer seemed all that sinister to Laura. As they flashed by her car's windows she had trouble mustering any of the outrage she'd felt just the day before.

Yesterday I lived in the twentieth century, she realized. Today… the twenty-first. It's just more dangerous now, she told herself.

The road turned in the direction of the Village, hugging the foot of the tall mountain parallel with the shore. The car passed the tunnel leading down to Krantz's labs, and then inexplicably began to pull to a stop. Laura looked all around. On the narrow black-sand beach far below she saw a small rubber boat with two large outboard motors.

Three men knelt in a tight semicircle around a small patch of sand.

Two had rifles.

The door opened, and Laura got out. She headed down the steep hill. The descent was treacherous. In some places she slid on the seat of her jeans, with both hands dragging through the loose soil.

When she reached the bottom, the three men were waiting for her. One was Hoblenz.

'What the hell're you doin' here?' he asked.

'Looking for you,' Laura replied, brushing the dirt off the back of her pants.

All three men watched the effort.

Hoblenz barked out an order, sending his two men down the beach in opposite directions. A gentle surf washed up onto the sand behind Hoblenz. 'Well,' he said in his Texas twang, 'shoot.'

Laura reached into her pocket and pulled out the card with the FBI's telephone number. She handed it to Hoblenz and told him about being approached by the agents. He listened in silence, glancing back and forth between her and the card. Laura also told him that she thought there'd been something fishy about the V-mail she'd gotten and about her equally suspicious telephone conversation with Jonathan.

'That's all pretty interestin',' Hoblenz said. He put the card in the breast pocket of his camouflage blouse.